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[[Th]]e Quiet Anger of Jacob Lawrence

By JOHN CANADAY

PAINTINGS of social consciousness, including the theme of the Negro's struggle for civil rights, have been most successful in this country recently when understated. Melodramatization has been less effective than straightforward illustration. Exactly why this is so, is not quite clear to me, but the case has been that the angrier the artists have let themselves appear, the least convincing have been their declamations. Thus the exhibition of paintings by Jacob Lawrence at the Dintenfass Gallery, 18 East 67th Street, which is a soft-spoken show by any oratorical standard, is superior to the "protest" shows that, on several occasions last year, fell so embarrassingly flat. 

Mr. Lawrence is exhibiting a series of gouaches and temperas done as illustrations for his book, "Harriet and the Promised Land," to be published by Windmill Books, Inc., telling the story of Harriet Tubman, a Negro liberator and abolitionist born in 1822. I daresay that advocates of vehement statement will find these illustrations too gentle for their taste, but it was their reserve that attracted me. When you are merely pounded at, your guard goes up. Unless the artist is a Goya, quiet narratives like these are a more winning (in a double sense of the word) form of attack. Among other shows, as the second half of the season begins to stir itself, although not yet very impressively, are the following: 

John Rosenbaum (Landau-Alan, 766 Madison Avenue at 66th Street): These "constructions with polarized light" consist of small boxes with circular apertures framing patterned discs rotating against one another at different speeds. In shifting conjunctions, the patterns change in ways suggesting the old-fashioned kaleidoscope - with the major difference that the polarized color combinations are unexpected. Fun to watch. 

Richard Artschwager (Castelli, 4 East 77th Street): This gallery has so frequently offered work that seems puerile but has ended by making the grade in the international circus, that a bit of caution might seem advisable in saying that Mr. Artschwager doesn't stand a chance. So let us say that he doesn't stand a chance with me, no matter if he winds up in Venice. His semi-minimal sculpture is executed in, I take it, a kind of plastic, and is patterned in an enlarged version of the flowing patterns familiar in the marbleized papers of 19th century bookbindings. If there is anything here that is pointful, ornamental, original, inventive, or interesting in any way, it escaped me in spite of a current mood of good will inspired, irrationally, by the advent of the New Year. However, he seems to have more to offer than Richard Tuttle.

Richard Tuttle and Jean Jones Jackson (Parsons, 24 West 57th Street): The briefest possible description of Mr. Tuttle's work should suffice if, indeed, it is not excessive. He cuts pieces of sailcloth about three to four feet across, irregularly eight-sided, hems them, and dyes them solid colors of no distinction. That is all. It puts me terribly out of patience. 

The second and unrelated show in the galleries, of paintings by Jean Jones Jackson, perhaps benefits by contrast, although it is no Sistine ceiling by any comparison. The paintings are miniatures, some of them of postcard dimensions or smaller, of an acute preciosity but, within their chosen field of arch fantasy, quite successful. At once sardonic and sugary, they play the field of motifs from gay-nineties football teams to pseudo-Rousseauesque landscape, applying the device of unexpected juxtaposition learned from surrealism without pretension to surrealist vision. The lack of pretension in general is their strengthening virtue in a field that is, really, played out. 

Paul Giovanopoulos (Larcada, 23 East 67th Street): Mr. Giovanopoulos like to draw, and does so with a fine-lined complexity in black ink on white paper. As one example, he gives us "Police Dogs in Birmingham, 1963," showing the head of a Negro woman peering out of the mouth of a ravening wolfish creature. The image, however, is more remindful of a medieval gargoyle than of the terrible event that inspired it. As another example, he presents without comment or interpretive intent, so far as I could see, a straightforward drawing of some clothes hangers. One is left with the feeling that here is a talent ready to speak if a need for speaking could be found - which, in a very direct way, is exemplary of the dilemma of the majority of talented figurative artists today.

N.Y. TIMES JAN. 6, 1968